It wasn’t long ago that a budding environmentalist had only a handful of choices in higher education. But about a decade ago, this all began to change. As sustainability became a major cultural watchword, many students—some new to academia, some returning after losing jobs—were searching for a modern kind of major, and the stage was set for a big boom of green-leaning college programs. Companies and corporations were running their own parallel campaigns at the time, aggressively hiring newly minted sustainability experts to help improve operations.

“It’s important to note that the drive to sustainability comes from student interest as well as industry drivers. Students enter the university with as strong an interest in design for the environment as design for communities,” says Kate Wingert-Playdon, associate dean and director for Architecture and Environmental Design at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art.

Yvette Bordeaux, Ph.D., the director of Professional Programs in Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, remembers the heady times during 2010 and 2011 when the field was taking off.

“Sustainability was the new up-and-coming field. It was our biggest concentration in a while in terms of students in the group, and jobs were all over the place,” she says. “For a while, big companies like Johnson & Johnson were hiring these folks to come in and tell them what they need to do to improve sustainability.”

There was little public fanfare when Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell’s bill establishing new parking regulations in the Mantua section of West Philadelphia passed, easily, in City Hall.

As any Philadelphian will tell you, parking is perhaps the most contentious issue in the entire city—and Blackwell has often acted as the commander-in-chief of parking wars, most recently fighting for a parking-minimums bill.

Her new legislation establishes no parking anytime along parts of Mantua Avenue, Ogden Street, and N. 37th Street, and new space for bicycling and walking.

Someday the row of young elm trees will transform this sunbaked stretch of Delaware Avenue, but first they have to survive the next couple years. To the west is the Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant. To the east is a Sanitation Convenience Center (where you can drop off hard-to-dispose-of items like tires and mattresses) and acres of old industrial lots before you get to the Delaware River. The elm trees line the Delaware River Greenway’s multiuse trail and, once mature, should shade it with beautiful arching boughs that provide a buffer from the trucks that roar by. The problem is that young elms are delicate. Lawn mowers and weed whackers can wound their trunks, leading to an untimely demise.

Riverfront North, the organization leading the Greenway effort in Northeast Philadelphia, has found a solution through a partnership with the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), a nonprofit that helps citizens returning from incarceration find success in the workforce. After a tutorial in tree care from Riverfront North’s Stewardship Manager John Jensen, seven CEO participants got to work weeding a 5-foot perimeter around each tree and layering wood chips so that mowers will know where to avoid.

“It’s nice. I like coming out here, getting dirty,” says CEO participant Erica Williams, who grew up gardening with her grandmother. “I do want to get certified in landscaping.” Williams is also considering a career in waste management as a next step.

As a preschool teacher at Moonstone in South Philadelphia, Kate Leibrand was always thinking of new, creative lessons to do with her students. After mastering the art of papier-mâché, Play-Doh making, and the always-popular slime, she attempted to make chalk with her class. It was a disaster.

“Between inaccurate measuring and drying times, we were left with mush,” she says. “Not to be deterred by a failed attempt, I went home and worked on perfecting the chalk mixture in my tiny apartment.”

What started as a project in Leibrand’s kitchen has expanded into TWEE, a small-batch sidewalk chalk company with products carried throughout the country. In addition to alphabet and number sets designed to reinforce basic “ABC” and “123” recognition, TWEE is known for fun and whimsical designs like sushi, unicorn horns and frosted donuts.

"Subversive cards and other awesome sh*t,” read artist Katie Novak’s business card at the Go West Craft Fest at The Woodlands Cemetery, 4000 Woodland Avenue, a gathering with the liveliness of a Bruegel painting, splashed with light and laughter and layered with the scent of organic edibles and spring buds, against a backdrop of tombstones. “Why not send something mildly offensive?” the card went on. The Donald Trump series by Novak, 34, might rile a few folks. Then again, some permanent residents of The Woodlands, a National Historic Landmark District, might have cheered from their graves.

Abolitionist and activist Mary Grew (1813–1896), one of the Woodlands’ permanent residents, probably clapped from the hereafter. Grew helped a small group of black and white women launch the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in December of 1833, days after the American Anti-Slavery Society barred women. Women leaping from their parlors into politics shocked many Philadelphians, and their forming an interracial organization enraged them. Grew, however, was just hitting her stride. She would be bounced from the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London for demanding to speak, and later become president of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association.

The names on headstones at this green 54-acre site, with its soft swell of hills, reads like a Who’s Who, or Who Was Who, among 19th- and early 20th-century Philadelphians. Famed controversial realist painter Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) rests here, as does cardiologist Jacob Mendez Da Costa, M.D. (1833–1900), who served as assistant surgeon during the Civil War, where he did one of the earliest studies of anxiety disorders in soldiers, at first called “Irritable Heart.”

After watching 2016’s Hidden Figures, a movie that documents the contributions made by three brilliant African-American women to the space race, then-10-year-old Cordelia Dunston decided that she wanted to be an engineer. Her father, who works on Drexel’s campus, heard about a program called TechShopz, managed by the nonprofit TechGirlz, and led by Drexel’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. He signed up his daughter for the program.

“I learned how to make a website using HTML, and we also made a game where we had to debug little programs in it—that was fun,” says Dunston of her experiences at TechShopz.

“I like how it is college girls who are trying to teach us to do things with engineering, because a lot of us have no clue what we are doing,” says Dunston. “They are a little bit more experienced than us, and they can teach us how to make things and have more insight into the engineering world and coding.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s “zero tolerance policy” for undocumented immigrants crossing into the United States has caused a major uproar around the country. The protests intensified as images of children being held in cages started to circulate on social media. People across the nation could not believe that our country would do such horrible things to children.

The outcry has focused on the morality of separating young children from parents when they are most vulnerable – seeking asylum and protection from violence and persecution back home. Since then, we learned the images were from 2014, when the undocumented minor crisis first spiked, with over 60,000 children crossing our borders from Central and South America largely to escape gang violence.

This episode made me consider how much we, as a society, really know about the treatment of immigrant children in the U.S. and whether we realize that children being housed in cages is only the tip of the iceberg.

On a tree-lined street in West Mount Airy, solar panel installer Thomas Glenn confesses to a less than green past.

“I was a litter bug,” Glenn, who was born and raised in Kensington, says. “I’d get a bag of chips, throw the wrapper on the ground, get some Kandy Kakes, throw those on the ground. I wouldn’t care. But then when you work for PowerCorps, you gotta pick all that trash up. You really don’t want to litter after that because you see what it’s doing to all the creeks, streams, sewer inlets, and you realize the damage it’s [doing].”

Katrell Holmes, another solar panel installer on the team, seconds that. “I curse people out [who are littering] now,” he says with a laugh. “I know what people are going through in PowerCorps right now. It’s hot outside and they’re cleaning up in the heat, and I’ve been through it.”

Some might say that lingering spirit energy has helped the Historic Fair Hill burial ground become a fount of goodwill, good food and learning in a struggling neighborhood. The 4.5-acre cemetery and gardens at 2901 Germantown Ave. sit on land that William Penn gave to his friend and fellow seeker of religious freedom George Fox, founder of Quakerism. Freedom fighting has become emblematic at Historic Fair Hill (HFH). Today, rows of kale, carrots and marigolds lie not far from the graves of Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), grandmother of the women’s movement, and Robert Purvis (1810–1898), a black businessman and activist. Mobs threatened to kill these two antislavery stalwarts because they supported the Underground Railroad, the secret network of blacks and whites that helped slaves reach freedom.

In the 1980s, the burial ground changed hands and slid into neglect. “It was ugly,” said Elizabeth Gutierrez, 60, a neighbor who has lived across the street for almost 40 years. “There were rapes, deaths, drugs, trash and dead chickens, probably from Vodoun rituals,” she said. “My husband, Genaro, and I had three young sons then, and I was pregnant with our daughter. The situation put our kids at risk. I called the Friends Center on Cherry Street and asked them to do something.”

The conversation bore fruit. In 1993, a group of Quakers formed a nonprofit to purchase and restore the site. The burial ground didn’t bloom overnight into a refuge in a rough North Philly neighborhood.

An entomological research project might bring to mind expeditions through far-away jungles or at least meadows out in the countryside. It probably doesn’t conjure up an Old City chocolate factory rooftop. But to reach this field site we walked into Shane Confectionery. From there we hiked up the stairs through one of the most delicious-smelling buildings in Philadelphia. We reached the fourth floor, ascended a ladder to the roof, and emerged to collect data.

Bee researcher Doug Sponsler, based out of Penn State’s Center for Pollinator Research, grew up in Philadelphia. He completed his doctorate at Ohio State University, but, “what I’ve always wanted to do is to come back to study plants and insects in the place I grew up and learned to love nature.” Beyond just wanting to come back home, Philly bee research offers a chance to investigate urban ecology, “the relationship between human land use in cities and the plants and animals that can coexist. Studying plants and pollinators gives you a really broad swath of the ecological relationships in the city.”

The apiary (a site with one or more bee hives) we visited is owned by the Philadelphia Bee Company, which, in addition to producing seasonal and regional varietal honeys, provides educational programming and removes problem bees and wasps, “anything that flies and stings,” said owner Don Shump, who handled the bees on our visit.

Future's So Bright

by Emily Kovach

Ice cream trucks may be an iconic symbol of summer in the city, but are they really worth celebrating? Nostalgia may inspire a moment of happiness, and there is something wonderful about being out in the world and having dessert come to you, but the ice creams vended from the small windows are rarely of quality, and let’s not even get started about the maddening music on loop.

Bright Yellow Creamery, a Philly-based company in its second year, takes everything that’s great about an ice cream truck and ditches the rest. From the cutest little daffodil-yellow pop-top vending mobile, its cart-on-wheels hits a glorious retro-future aesthetic note with its sweet curves and simple design. The ice creams scooped from the refrigerated interior follow suit: all-natural, unfussy flavors that speak to times passed, with a focus on ingredient sourcing that’s thoroughly modern.

“I try to keep it as classic at possible; we don’t do any eccentric flavors,” says owner Steve Dorcelien. “[Our flavors aren’t] breaking the mold, but I’m trying to use the best ingredients to bring out that pronounced flavor. I want it to be like a shot in the mouth.”

Dorcelien’s journey began a few years ago when his girlfriend, Rachel Hunt, gifted him a consumer-model Cuisinart ice cream maker. At the time, the couple was living in New York City, and Dorcelien was working in marketing. For fun, he’d whip up batches of homemade ice cream and bring them to parties and potlucks, and soon enough, friends and family were clamoring for more.

In January 2017, the couple relocated to Philadelphia for Hunt’s work, and Dorcelien decided that his new city was the right place to launch an ice cream company. He enrolled in an ice cream making course at Penn State (a popular program for local dessert artisans), which he said was integral in making the leap from home hobbyist to professional culinary creator.

“I’m not a chef by background,” he notes, “but my food knowledge stems from my mother’s cooking, and she was all about taking what she grew in the garden and putting it into food. That’s where my passion comes from.”

The choice to operate Bright Yellow Creamery out of a unique vending cart was one of economics and aesthetics. “I couldn’t afford a truck at the time and didn’t want a massive unit,” he says. “And I wanted something that would stand out.”

Every week during warm weather, you can find it at farmers markets: Saturdays at Rittenhouse, Thursdays at University City and Wednesdays at 10th and Chestnut streets, as well as occasional smaller festivals. In its second year, the brand is growing: Pints of its ice cream, made with milk from Trickling Springs and as many local products as possible (like honey from Fruitwood Orchard and fruit from Taproot Farm) are for sale in Green Aisle Grocery; it’s in the process of adding a second cart to the fleet; and Dorcelien recently hired his first employee. They also get plenty of catering gigs for special events and weddings.

He loves the way the cart allows him to be on the ground, mixing it up with his customers. “I want to be on the ground and be able to really talk to the people … the cart allows that intimacy,” Dorcelien notes. “I love people and I love food, so it’s a great opportunity for me.”

The first thing you notice about “Please Plant This Book,” a collection of poems by Francis Daulerio with illustrations by Scott Hutchison, is that it is not a book.

It’s eight packets of heirloom seeds, rubber-banded together. The fronts of each packet bare a drawing by the hand of Hutchison, the former lead singer and guitarist of Frightened Rabbit. On the reverse side is a series of verses from writer and teacher Daulerio that evoke flashes of seasons and soil, rain-soaked windows and whistling tea kettles; a flickering set of images pulled from dreams, intersecting parts of dozens of stories.

Seeds are the most minute, but still visible, components of nature. Yet, Daulerio and Hutchison let their book carry so much: the legacy of Richard Brautigan, who wrote the first version of “Please Plant This Book” 50 years ago on packets of carrot and wildflower seeds; their love of the outdoors on a swiftly deteriorating planet; and the mission of preventing suicide. Brautigan took his own life in 1984. Hutchison did as well, just this month, at the age of 36.

Can the legal system improve the quality of public education? A Pennsylvania Supreme Court case gives cause for optimism. But first, let’s review how the system works now.

In the United States, your Zip code determines whether or not you have access to high-quality education. According to an NPR investigative study, a wide disparity in educational outcomes across socioeconomic lines remains the norm.

This disparity is largely due to a national trend of over-reliance on local property taxes to fund schools. State governments provide minimal funding to public schools, leaving individual districts to tax local homeowners to make up the difference.

It was a hot August morning when Suzanne Hagner joined the Bicycle Club of Philadelphia for a ride from the art museum to the airport. They took off behind the museum and onto the Schuylkill River Trail, riding single-file, calling out, “Passing on the left!” as they rode by other cyclists and joggers.

But one jogger, wearing earbuds and apparently not paying attention, didn’t notice the group passing her.

The jogger turned into the cyclists, Hagner hit her, and they both tumbled onto the pavement.

Philadelphia is America’s Garden Capital, with a whopping 36 public gardens within 30 miles of the city—a distinction that no other city in America can claim. Peruse our guide to these glorious green spaces to plan your next garden trip.

Racks of tanks with plastic tubes feeding in and out stand against the thick stone walls of the Fairmount Water Works. Together with the microscopes and other lab equipment, it looks like a mad scientist’s underground workshop—that is, until you start reading the cheerful interpretive panels about freshwater mussel restoration.

“We’re demonstrating why we care about mussels and what we can do to help mussels in our rivers and streams, so we created a see-through laboratory with acrylic walls so you can observe what a scientist would actually be doing in a mussel hatchery,” explained Kurt Cheng, shellfish coordinator at the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary.

Over the past 75 years,Americans have relentlessly pursued liberation from household tasks. How we eat has been at the heart of this movement. Fast food, TV dinners and microwaves have all promised more free time—no more food shopping, cooking or, for the most part, cleaning.

Unfortunately, that promised free time has been filled up not only with more work, but also more visits to the doctor, pharmacy and hospital. The salt, sugar and soda that dominate the American diet have coincided with an unprecedented explosion of health problems plaguing our country.

Several years ago, Chinatown resident Anna Perng was grappling with her child’s autism diagnosis. For friends of hers in similar situations who had language barriers, access to information was even more challenging to find. When people started asking her for help, she became involved with a support group and decided to serve on the Philadelphia Autism Project committee.

“Raising my kids has made me aware of barriers, both physical and programmatic, which are rooted in the historic segregation of disabled people,” Perng says.

Stoneleigh: a Natural Garden—the Villanova estate turned rustic public green space profiled in Grid’s May 2018 issue—is the most recent addition to the 36 public gardens that earned Philadelphia the moniker of America’s Garden Capital.

But the uniquely beautiful green space wasn’t even open to the public yet when Natural Lands executive director Molly Morrison found herself sending an impassioned plea to the garden’s contact list—with the words “Save Stoneleigh” in the subject line.

When a prominent law firm partner casually posed this question to a group of Penn Law students I was part of, I shifted uneasily. My peers responded with the professions held in the highest esteem in our country, and the most lucrative: They were the sons and daughters of doctors, bankers, lawyers and engineers. Feeling slightly embarrassed, I excused myself from the conversation.